LEARNING CENTER

​Search engines have become the primary resources for individuals and businesses looking for products, services, and solutions to their current challenges.

Gone are the days of yellow pages, newspaper directories, and other traditional means of searching for answers. In today’s consumer driven economy, online search has taken front and center to supply our every answer. Your business needs to adapt to these particular changes of reaching the new consumer.

Businesses are no longer spending thousand of dollars on Yellow Page listings, business directories, newspaper advertisements, and direct mailers to be found. Every business employing the use of a website, now has maximum potential to be found by customers online through search engine optimization (SEO), and utilizing inbound marketing strategies.

​If you’re new to SEO and search engine strategies, allow this article to serve as an introduction and help you gain greater insights and stronger understanding of the fundamentals of the SEO processes. These fundamentals, concepts, and ideas are all examples of best practices that come from SEO experts.

The saying goes, “Sales are the lifeblood of business”, conversely, keywords are the lifeblood of SEO. This is why selecting the proper keywords is crucial to your most effective SEO strategy. We recommend that you start with 10 KEYWORDS associated with your product, service or solution. Begin using these 10 keywords, but always adapt those words to optimally reach your audience based on what they search for.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of free tools on the internet you can access to find your keywords that are getting the most searches, visits and clicks. You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Wordstream’s Keyword Tool, and SERP Keyword Research Database, for starters. These tools will allow you to leverage search volume, competition, and measure your probability for success of getting found within the search engines via your 10 keywords selected for your search engine optimization strategy.

According to Google: “Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors.” So, what does this all mean? It means that content is king.

The more relevant and value-laden content on your pages will increase your Off-Page SEO. The best one-two punch for Natural Links, is to create relevant, real, and reliable content for your ideal audience, and this will take care of your On-Site SEO as well as your Off-Page SEO.

ARE GUEST BLOGS REALLY WORTH IT?

There are benefits of guest blogs, but they should be used for the proper reasons; community building and relevant PR. The goal should be to create relevant content that is shareable and creates engagement.

4 PRO TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE OFF-PAGE SEO​1. Only post to and accept posts from reputable and established sites2. Use No-Follow links, so search engines do not pass SEO authority between your sites3. Publish original content-only! Don’t publish articles and posts already published elsewhere4. Do not send out unsolicited emails asking for guest blogging opportunities - it is super spammy

HOW TO BUILD LINKS

As previously discussed, multiple websites use the same keywords and in order for search engines to properly differentiate how your page should be ranked.​They focus on two factors:

Social Search is identified as the way in which search engines factor a user’s social network into how results are displayed after a particular search.

While this is still being molded and defined by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even Facebook, it is important as marketers we look to SEO and social media strategy as one and the same.

Here are 3 Pro Tips to help you use social search to influence SEO.

1. MAKE SURE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS ARE INFORMED BY YOUR SEO TOOLSMake sure your blog or website has social sharing tools built in. One strategy to implement is the to update your company profile, The combination of your keywords as part of your company profile, combined with the strength of your content and shares will produce increased search results. Another social search strategy is to include share links in your post.

2. FINE AND ENCOURAGE YOUR IDEAL AND TARGET AUDIENCEThe primary reason social search provides tremendous value is that is creates a connection between relevancy and authority.

Your audience and followers provide heavy influence on search activity and social sites combined for greater relevancy and authority. Here’s two steps to help:

(a) Find your influencers who like, comment and share your content,(b) Nurture your influencers by thanking them and offer them something of value to keep the cycle repeating.

In previous years, businesses focused on true ranking alone, however in the last few years Click Through Rate (CTR) has become more relevant to search results. Today’s search results don’t just produce links, they now produce images, videos, profiles, maps, and other meta descriptions that help searches choose the result that best suits their needs.

RECOMMENDED APPROACH TO SEARCH RANKINGS

We need to be aware that the search results, and Click Through Rate will now influence how what the potential customers will view going forward. The one result you need to consider when doing Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO is VISIBILITY and appearance of listings. XML Sitemaps, and Rich Snippet Protocols all help produce greater visibility with e-commerce listings for pricing, inventory, quantity, and a wide range of details. It is no longer enough to simply rank - you need to do your research or hire a professional to create dozens of opportunities for enhancing a search engine listing, and ultimately obtain greater volumes of traffic.